Project management software on a shoestring

Table of contents

• 1. Create a table of dates
• 2. Populate the table
• 3. Add task owners
• 4. Add week 1 of your Gantt chart
• 5. Now add the formula that will power your Gantt chart
• 6. Copy the formula to the rest of your first week
• 7. Adding the formatting
• 8. Add the extra weeks to your Gantt chart

For a while, when I was working as a content manager on the HP account at Publicis, we used Microsoft Project. I loved it and so did the rest of the team. But none of our clients used it. We got used to them asking for “something like this, but in Excel”.

So that’s what I created. I didn’t have the patience to manually colour rows of cells, only to change them all when the start date or task durations changed. So I used formulas and conditional formatting to create a sheet that would auto-update if you changed either of those values. [Read more…]